Young & Rubicam/Chicago taps Bill Cimino as new creative leader

Bill Cimino, a veteran of the Chicago ad industry, is taking the creative reins at Young & Rubicam/Chicago as the shop’s new chief creative officer. Cimino spent the past eight years as an executive creative director at DDB/Chicago, where he was most recently in charge of the agency’s McDonald’s business.

Cimino has also worked on DDB’s Capital One credit card account and was a part of DDB’s Anheuser-Busch creative team for a while before that flagship account left the agency last year.

Prior to DDB, Cimino was an executive creative director at Foote Cone & Belding in southern California and a copywriter at Ogilvy.

Cimino is replacing Bob Winter, whose tour of duty at Young & Rubicam lasted only two years. Young & Rubicam, in announcing the hiring of Cimino, said only that Winter was leaving to work in another market, with no indication of where he might be headed. Winter did not return a phone call seeking additional comment.

Cimino now becomes the fourth creative leader at Young & Rubicam in the past five years. Cimino comes to a shop that has never managed to fully regain the momentum it lost when Sears moved its brand advertising account from Y&R to McGarryBowen/Chicago shortly after Winter’s arrival.

Though the Sears loss was huge, Y&R did retain the advertising accounts for the Craftsman and Kenmore brands, two key product lines at Sears. The agency has a handful of other accounts, including BMO Harris, Famous Footwear and hotels.com, but they are not large nor particularly lucrative pieces of business.

In picking Cimino to replace Winter, Y&R/Chicago CEO Kary McIlwain found someone with a creative profile similar to that of Winter’s. McIlwain said of Cimino: “I am confident that he will move into this role with the talent and the energy that has been behind all his successes so far.”

Cimino is considered a bright creative talent, but he also is somewhat old-school rather than new wave. He is not known as an expert in the digital arena, where so much of the focus is now in the advertising business.

Coincidentally, Cimino and Winter both did stints at DDB, where they worked together on the much-award “Real Men of Genius” radio campaign for Bud Light. That campaign reveled in the sheer joy of wordplay and the ability to conjure up ever more absurd tributes to strange people.

More recently, Cimino produced a popular spot for McDonald’s called “Joe and Frank,” a long-form commercial about two old codgers who hang out together at McDonald’s and flirtatiously eye women of a certain age. The spot is a delightful throwback to the days when the burger behemoth was known for its story-driven TV commercials.

Cimino wants to make Y&R an agency where the best creatives will want to work. But in order to do that, he and McIlwain first must lure more of the high-profile accounts that will attract the best creative minds.